Do I need to speak French in Morocco?

Let me put this honestly: you do not need French to travel Morocco well, but it's the single most useful European language to have here. Morocco was a French protectorate, and French remains the language of business, higher education, government paperwork and a huge amount of everyday signage. Most educated Moroccans, particularly in Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat and Fes, switch fluidly between Darija and French — often mid-sentence.

Where you'll see it most is on the page. Menus, road signs, shop fronts, museum labels and official forms are frequently in French (often alongside Arabic). If you can read a French menu, you'll order with far more confidence — knowing that poulet is chicken, agneau is lamb, and sans is 'without' saves a lot of guesswork. Even schoolroom French from years ago suddenly becomes very handy.

That said, English has spread fast in the tourism world. In hotels, riads, popular restaurants, tour offices and the main tourist sites, you'll almost always find someone who speaks good English, and younger Moroccans increasingly learn it. So if French isn't in your toolkit at all, don't stress — you'll communicate fine in the places travellers spend most of their time.

My practical take: lean on a few words of Darija for warmth (salam, shukran, afak), keep English as your main working language, and treat any French you have as a bonus that smooths the edges — reading menus, chatting with an older taxi driver, or charming a shopkeeper. The real winner, oddly, is Darija: a Moroccan who'll happily reply to you in French will positively light up if you greet them in their own mother tongue first.